My Journey to Pretzel: Preface

After running my site for more than 12 years, I decided it was time to replace the software behind it with something new.

I started this blog with .Text in August of 2002, which later was merged into CommunityServer. I wrote many extensions for CS, customized it in many ways, and was active in the community. Telligent, the company behind CommunityServer, even awarded me with a MVP status.

However, I lost interest in CS after a while. I started writing my own blog engine (as most developers do I guess). Well, not only once but countless times. Every few months I threw away the current code and started again from scratch. I took the opportunity to play around with the newest stuff, ASP.NET MVC and Nancy, Entity Framework or RavenDb, n-tier architecture or CQRS.

Well, though I learnt a lot about the different technologies, libraries etc, I never got to the point where my software was ready to be published.

Finally I decided to overcome my developer ego and use some existing software. A few month ago I switched to Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. Some weeks later I switched again, this time to Pretzel, which is very similar to Jekyll but written in .NET.

After writing this introduction, I intend to publish a couple of posts about the different stations of my journey to Pretzel in the next few weeks. E.g. I wrote several extensions for Pretzel, and I configured Azure for auto-deployment whenever I push to the git repository of this site.